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Before interviewing for a job, it’s reasonable and responsible to do some research on the people who are scheduled to interview you. This research might involve doing a few web searches to find out more about them, see what kinds of things they work on, maybe even learn about their interests so you can make small talk before the interview. That’s perfectly fine; they’ll be doing searches on you for the same reasons.

After waiting a reasonable amount of time following the interview (one to two weeks), it’s okay to email or call an interviewer or recruiter and ask for a status update. What’s not okay, though, is stalking an interviewer after the interview. Don’t send your interviewer friend requests on Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, Twitter, or any other social network. Don’t post comments on their personal blog mentioning the interview. LinkedIn is a grey area, but it’s probably best not to try to connect with your interviewer unless you’re offered a job (connecting with recruiters is probably okay).

Remember that your relationship with your interviewer is a business relationship, not a personal relationship, and it does not extend to blogs, social networks, and other non-work-related websites. Trying to wedge yourself into an interviewer’s personal life is rude and annoying, and it’s likely to give the interviewer a negative impression of your personality, even if you did well in the actual interviews.

Pretty much everyone at Yahoo! uses Yahoo! Messenger to communicate, since there’s a lot of interteam, intercampus, and international collaboration. It’s not uncommon to get an IM from someone you don’t recognize who turns out to be a coworker, so when I got just such an IM this morning, that’s what I assumed was the case.

The following conversation ensued (name changed to protect the grammatically challenged):

mysterious_monkey786
ye

Ryan Grove
?

mysterious_monkey786
sorry do i know u ???

Ryan Grove
You tell me. You sent me a message.

mysterious_monkey786
oay hello i dont even know u …???? u r not added in m frnd list how can i sent u a msg

mysterious_monkey786
cheap trick to talk with a grl

Wow.

My musical tastes are ridiculously eclectic and there are few things I love more than discovering good new music. Thanks to Last.fm and Amazon MP3, finding new music is easy. The hard part is finding time to listen to it.

I don’t really like listening to music while programming. It fragments my concentration; I can concentrate on the code or the music, but not both at once. I like listening to music while driving, but the acoustics at highway speeds are terrible and my music selection in the car is necessarily limited. As a result, my music-listening time ends up being limited. To get my music fix, I’ll flop on the couch for an hour or so maybe once a week, crank up the sound system, and just focus on the music.

When’s your favorite time to listen to music? What’s your favorite place? Do you listen while working? Let’s see some comments.

My head is still reeling after seeing the new Indiana Jones movie yesterday. It keeps coming back in flashes, like a bad dream. I’m not exaggerating; the movie is so ridiculous and incoherent that my memories of it feel exactly like the memories of some of my more nonsensical dreams. My biggest fear is that watching the first three movies will now remind me of this one, and I’ll enjoy them less as a result.

If you’re an Indiana Jones fan and haven’t seen Kingdom of the Crystal Skull yet, here’s my advice: don’t. For godssake don’t. See something else. Anything. Speed Racer even. Please don’t make the same mistake I did.

Every so often, perhaps once every few months, I’ll get a call at my desk from a Yahoo! customer who has dialed the company switchboard and then punched in a random extension in the hopes of reaching a human who can help them with a problem.

In a perfect world, this would be a reasonable strategy. In a perfect world, I would know everything about every Yahoo! product, I would be able to help this poor desperate customer, and then maybe they would tell their friends what a great company Yahoo! is because they randomly dialed a developer who was happy to give them the help they needed.

Unfortunately, the world is not perfect and I don’t know everything about every Yahoo! product. I don’t even know everything about the product I work on. The odds that someone with a question about Search Assist would dial a random number and actually reach me rather than one of the other 14,000 Yahoo! employees are infinitesimally small. So, naturally, the people who randomly dial my number invariably ask questions about products that I know nothing about.

By the time someone resorts to dialing random numbers, they’re pretty desperate. Sometimes they’re very upset. They don’t care that I’m a developer working on something completely unrelated to whatever it is they’re having a problem with; to them, I am the human personification of Yahoo! the Big Faceless Corporation, and they expect me to have at my fingertips the entirety of Yahoo’s corporate knowledge.

When I explain that I can’t help them, they expect me to be able to transfer them to someone who can, and they find it incomprehensible that, as a Yahoo! insider, I don’t have a handy list of Top Secret support phone numbers. Sometimes this makes them angrier, and sometimes this makes them ask again really, really nicely in the hopes that I’ll decide to rebel against my cruel superiors and transfer them to one of the Top Secret numbers.

In the end, I’m unable to help these desperate people. I give them the premium support phone number (which is for paying customers), but usually the questions they’re asking are about a free product, for which (as far as I know) there is no phone support.

It’s not that Yahoo! doesn’t care; we do. It’s just that there’s no way we could possibly hire enough human beings to provide personal support for every one of our hundreds of millions of users (most of whom are using free products). It’s a simple problem of scale; no company in the world could afford this. Not even Google. Not even Microsoft.

Even so, whenever this happens, it pretty much ruins my day.

Obligatory disclaimer: the opinions expressed in this post are mine alone and do not represent the views of my employer.

Next Thursday, May 15th, Yahoo! Search will host a developer launch party for SearchMonkey, our awesome new open developer platform. The festivities will take place from 5:30 to 8:30pm at Yahoo! Headquarters in Sunnyvale, California.

If you’re a developer and you’d like to learn more about SearchMonkey, meet the folks behind it (including yours truly), see live demos, eat free food, and drink free beer, register for the event at upcoming.org and send an email containing your full name and the name of your company (if any) to searchmonkeyevent@yahoo-inc.com.

Space is limited and the friendly security guards at the front gate won’t let you in if you’re not on the list, so be sure to RSVP soon.

There’s a post on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer blog describing the ridiculous series of steps IE users may have to go through if they decide they want to downgrade IE after installing Windows XP Service Pack 3. The logic works something like this:

• If you currently have IE6 installed on XPSP2, you can install XPSP3 and then upgrade to IE7, and you will be able to downgrade back to IE6 at any time by uninstalling IE7.
• If you currently have IE7 installed on XPSP2 and you upgrade to XPSP3, you will not be able to uninstall IE7 unless you first uninstall XPSP3, because doing so would result in your system running a version of IE6 older than the one that ships with XPSP3, which would in turn result in the destruction of the known universe.
• If you currently have IE8 beta 1 installed on XPSP2 and you upgrade to XPSP3, you will not be able to uninstall IE8, because that too would destroy the universe. Instead, Microsoft strongly recommends that you uninstall IE8 while running XPSP2, then upgrade to XPSP3, then reinstall IE8. They recommend it so strongly that they put it inside both a <b> tag and a <font> tag (and the <font> tag even has one of those fancy newfangled color attributes).

This, children, is why browsers should be standalone applications rather than part of an operating system. There’s probably also a lesson here about how you shouldn’t use a browser made by people who still think <font> tags are a pretty neat idea.

Avdi Grimm discusses the subject of beautiful code in his latest blog post, and he uses the Ramaze source code as an example. He’s right; Ramaze is an excellent example of clean, well-organized source code, which is one of the reasons it’s become my web framework of choice.

One side effect of having such a clean codebase is that it lowers the barrier of entry that might otherwise prevent people from contributing patches. As a result, despite the fact that Ramaze is young and still fairly unknown as open source projects go, it has many active contributors and is maturing rapidly.

This morning when I left for work, I noticed approximately ten honeybees sitting, motionless, on the inside of the closed garage door. It was the first time I had seen bees in the garage and I was worried they might be swarming in the roof or something since it didn’t seem likely that all of them had gotten in by accident, but there was no swarm that I could see; just ten motionless bees. I left them there and went to work.

When I came home this evening, the bees were no longer on the garage door. I thought they must have flown away until I noticed a dead bee on the ground. Looking closer, I found another, and another, and another. In all, I counted twenty-five dead bees on the ground, and one that was still alive and standing but barely moving.

There are two mysteries here:

1. Where did the twenty-six bees come from?
2. What killed twenty-five of them and left one virtually paralyzed?

Anyone?

Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror appears to have discovered how much WordPress sucks. Kudos for actually looking under the hood, Jeff. I wish more people would do that.